In child therapy, the primary goal of rational emotive behavior therapy (REBT) is to teach a child:

• A. To identify and change irrational beliefs underlying psychological difficulties
• B. To learn coping skills through reinforcement
• C. To analyze dreams for underlying conflicts
• D. To improve memory for events

Answer: (A)

Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT) in child work focuses on how thoughts shape feelings and actions, and it holds that distress mainly comes from irrational beliefs about events rather than the events themselves. The goal is to help the child identify these rigid, unhelpful beliefs, challenge their truth and usefulness, and replace them with more flexible, evidence-based thoughts. Therapists guide kids through the processes of recognizing how a triggering event leads to an automatic belief, which then produces emotional and behavioral outcomes, and they teach disputing and re-framing strategies so the child can respond to situations more adaptively. This emphasis on recognizing and transforming irrational beliefs underlies REBT’s approach to reducing psychological difficulties and improving functioning.

Other approaches focus more on practicing coping skills through reinforcement, analyzing dreams for hidden conflicts, or improving memory for events, which do not capture REBT’s central aim of altering the belief patterns that drive distress.